Built a macOS utility app in 23 days. It later crossed 400+ users.
Hey r/SaaS
I Built a MacOS app and launched it on December on reddit now it has crossed 400+ Daily active users in 3 months only through reddit. Sharing what I learnt, what mistakes I did and my thoughts.
I used to be the engineer who likes to build stuff but had insane anxiety launching it fearing feedbacks and Always hid behind coding. At one point in time I had to launch as my Infra cost started to creep in. I built my app in around 23 days and Did a V1 Launch on reddit.
Here is one of the very first post I did on it - https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1p7e5nz/i_got_tired_of_losing_thoughts_while_waiting_for/
What I learnt: It is really tempting to build one more feature, One more Animation, Shortcut, Button. But what really matters is genuinely launching it and iterating over it. I know this sounds like a cliche, but After my initial launch I gained a lot of traction.
Lot of new requirements come from lot of different users from different countries. I got lost in building to every user's need.. which is very specific to that user only.. If I had to go back. I would build a feature only if more than 10 users request it.
In my honest opinion Launching on Product hunt is overrated. Got 1000s of page visit (ranked 22) but only very few converted. But product hunt gives you insane backlink credibility and multiple forums scrape the product hunt and list your product over there which ranks your page top on google search. So Takeaway is dont wait for the perfect moment or be so emotionally invested for your first product hunt launch.
For Macapps you need Apple developer license. Though my app is not listed on Mac App Store. you still need the license for DMG Notarization which in turn increases the product's trust factor. Without the notarization your app will be flagged by macbooks on launch saying it is not a verified app which will raise concern among users.
Having good media assets to your Landing page and Launch Video is the differentiator. I used ScreenStudio combined with adobe premier pro, which was worth it for all the gifs and medias.
Other tech stacks - Apple dev license $99/year | ScreenStudio for media assets $99/ year | Vercel for Deployment $20/mo | Supabase for Database $20/mo | Plausible for analytics $20/mo | Cursor and Claude $20/mo each | Polar for Payments | Resend for linking SMTP mailboxes | Swift/XCode for Macapp dev | Next.js for Landing Page.
Though it is not a huge user base or revenue still thought I would share my small learnings to the community. Have a great day people. Happy to answer questions.